


The life this has to offer

by little_giddy



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-23 01:00:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/616316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_giddy/pseuds/little_giddy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha, nineteen, undercover on a mission to the Farm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The life this has to offer

Natasha Romanoff basked in the luxury of being bored.

It was her second week on the Farm, and today, if the fates allowed such wild ambitions to be fulfilled, they would throw a knife at a target and point a gun.

There were rows of them, returned to desks like errant children, mumbling verb forms and mnemonics under their breath and following teacher.

Fuck this shit, she thought. The voice was not her own and she did not move.

\---

She threw the knife. It landed a reassuring three centimetres from the centre of the comfortably-distanced target.

Another training range, her feet bare and her height not higher than the target: someone told her it was harder to miss on purpose, to portray frustration instead of betraying triumph, to accept no credit for a task executed perfectly. They told her this was a higher purpose, one for which she was intended.

A later training range, another assessing gaze: someone else told her that was bullshit, and her target was her target, centre or off, and she should hit it if she could.

\---

Dinner in the cafeteria. She tuned out the others filing around her table. Some were transparently practising the session about endearing yourself to an asset on their colleagues, some were congratulating themselves for noticing, and most are beginning to walk in what they assumed was a competent, assertive manner. Natasha wished she could tell them they were painting a target on their CIA-trained backs that they couldn’t yet hit with a throwing knife.

A boy talked about his doctor fiance to her and she listened, then spoke of her time at Cornell learning four languages on cue. He nudged her and pointed out the trainees who couldn’t leave ‘how to ingratiate 101’ in the classroom with a warming smile, a tilt of his eyebrows to the irony of what he was doing as he tried his level best to find out a fact about her to show and tell tomorrow as per the assignment, and she thought: well done. Good use of the situation, in a basic way.

They were all as deeply self-aware as only a spy in training could be at the grand old age of twenty one. Natasha was twenty-one on her alias and a vaguely imprecise nineteen in truth. She gave the doctor’s fiance the gift of an anecdote about how often she gets carded, and how it is, in fact, the worst.

\---

There were enough differences in the equipment, the language tuition and the dynamics that Natasha didn’t quite climb the walls and try the vents, but it was with a deep sense of relief and realignment that she slipped from her dorm to install the data tracker on the main server. The data tracker latched onto the network and began to fish for rogue taps on the line. Natasha didn’t download files on her fellow recruits: Fury had those, and the ones on the instructors, in abundance, and he’d shared his wealth before sending her in.

\---

Six weeks in, there was a day with war games. They strap on paintball guns and armbands, someone clever makes the obligatory ‘reds’ joke, and they move out to splatter paint in pursuit of a captured flag.

Natasha didn’t quite conceal herself in the hollow of a tree to wonder why she wasn’t enjoying the process more, but she asked the question and forced a smile, taking out three and missing one.

The afternoon - now that they had ‘blown off steam’, according to the commanders - was the beginning of the classes on ethics. The trainees had ferocious debates into the mild evening, raucous down the halls and carried over to the cafeteria, and covered ethics of seducing targets and assets, the ethics of lying to your charges, and even, when it was acceptable to punch a commanding officer in the face (in most cases, not, unless you were an icon of pop culture enacting fiction). Natasha listened with interest, participated when it seemed appropriate to the cover, and slid under the covers of the single in the Farm room to stare at the ceiling.

The walls in the dorm block were paper-thin, possibly in concession to an inevitable metaphor and to teach the recruits about paranoia.

The walls were so thin that for a moment, Natasha wondered if they were solid, or if she were in a dormitory, in a metal-framed single bed in a row of beds too long for their legs.

Natasha realised she clenching her fists and waiting for the door to slam open and those who had betrayed weakness in the war games to be dragged from the room.

She flattened her hands to the sheets below her and thought: damn Fury.

\---

The game revealed to her in its more complete form - was the mole even real, or a SHIELD agent playing the part? - Natasha applied herself to the task at hand. She recalled and used the grains of people in the files Fury had passed to her through her handler.

It had always been her own particular and useful fascination, how the barest facts of a person draw an outline of them or not, and where the tracing fails to align. At least, it is something she has come to find satisfaction in. Her memories are not complete enough to attest that it was her own predilection to begin with.

She used every weapon in her arsenal to smoothly integrate in her class of recruits, beginning by sitting by the boy and opening with, ‘Your fiance isn’t really a doctor. Tell me what she does,’ and smiling.

Somewhere, two SHIELD agents let out a breath.

\---

More ethics. More war games.

The CIA seemed to enjoy putting them together, as though to say, play it like a game, but never believe it to be one.

The delivery is new; the lesson is not.

\---

Common wisdom claimed the recruiting class weren’t really recruits if they didn’t conduct a clandestine ‘escape’ to the nearest bar. Natasha believed Simon - the pharmaceutical employee’s fiance - when he said it to her, but also believed it was an event so unspontaneous it was probably on a laminated Outlook print off of the year’s events under ‘week nine’.

It’s a thought held with less venom than before and she slipped her heels in her black backpack with the others - Sarah and Adela, her neighbours on either side, grinned from beside the fence.

The bar was authentically filthy and staffed as authentically with local cowboys, possibly as authentic as their Farm certificates. Natasha took offered beers and bought a few: it was light stuff, none of the bite of the alcohol that would properly warm her.

As she turned from the dancefloor as another country song started, Natasha excused herself to check the perimeter. They laughed and waved her away, while Natasha smiled in return and remembered that the best lie is the truth.

If she could excuse herself with such ease, so could the mole.

And then Natasha was on the street with the night air on her bare arms and the stars blocked only by dingy streetlights. It was nothing like the base, nothing like the floodlit Farm, and nothing like she’d seen alone in a long time. Her thoughts expanded, remembered, too much and too far into the night air, into night airs and rooftops long gone and more recent: she’d been skimming, bored, across the surface of the mission and surfacing clad in the alias of the recruit, the single story, only a little removed from surfacing as Natasha Romanoff in the first place.

There was a payphone on the street.

There was a number, hastily memorised from a note under a SHIELD mess plate.

She went to the phone and held the coins in her hand loosely, tried to imagine what she would ask, cradling the phone in the other, dial tone in her ear. Does he make everyone do this? Pointless. She was the one there. Is this a test or a mission? Irrelevant, obvious, poorly formulated, though she isn’t used to asking questions. If it was a mission, she should carry it out. If it was a test, she should pass it. It is, most likely, both. Did SHIELD know what they were sending her into? Likely. She could easily envision a psychologist’s report recommending increased socialisation. _Did they know I’d see them train their own, grown past the easiest age of second language acquisition (and third and -) but old enough for the guns and the questions?_ Almost certainly. _Did they think I would break, to see what duty of care I was not granted?_

No answer in her mind. There was no need.

She dials a different number: Coulson, the one who reminds her of a discreet sidearm, and gives a machine her authorisation.

‘Report?’

‘I have the mole.’

‘In custody or operating?’

Natasha turned, threw the knife she palmed from the training room in week two into the soft flesh of the ethics instructor’s leg, a hand to his mouth and his head to the side of the booth.

‘In custody.’

END.


End file.
